Bethesda has had a string of hits and misses. It's managed to earn fame and success with the Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles, but failure with the likes of Wet and other third party games.
Speaking to Edge, Pete Hines said: “I’ll admit this freely, I was the first guy or certainly one of the few guys who saw Wet at Bethesda. I was like, ‘That’s really cool. It’s very different.’ It’s not a home run. You don’t look at it and go: ‘There’s no way that won’t be a commercial smash.’ The graphics were not the highest end graphics of the day, but it had a quality, it had personality, it had an edge to it."
“The reason that I know it’s the kind of game that we would do is that when it came out, I took it home. And despite all the press tours and all the trade show that I had gone to where I had demoed the game and talked about it, I played it every night until I finished it and had a really good time. I had some spots where I got frustrated and emailed the designer the next morning saying, ‘I’m going to kill you for the skydiving level!’ But it was a fun, innovative game that did some really interesting things.”
Nothing in the industry is foolproof. There's always a measure of risk in every game you publish. It may not be the success you're hoping it will be regardless of how much marketing you pour into it—Duke Nukem Forever is a prime example of that.
“Nothing is a hundred percent in this industry, you know. Wet could have done better but honestly for us it did pretty well… It sold quite a few copies for what it was. It wasn’t Fallout 3, but not everything is.”
